


Where No One Knows You

by scioscribe



Category: L.A. Confidential (1997), The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: Face Slapping, Intercrural Sex, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 00:48:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9632297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “I was told to look for you,” Exley said after Michael shook the match out.“Someone say I had booze?”The pink stayed on Exley’s cheeks. “That you had the second half ofA Tree Grows in Brooklyn, actually.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> No one could do this full justice, but I did try. The Armed Services Editions mentioned were all real ASEs--and often torn in half to facilitate sharing--and _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ was indeed wildly popular. (Thanks, Molly Guptill!)
> 
> Warnings for internalized, casual homophobia (including slurs), under-negotiated kink, and, well, canon-typical unsettling attitudes.

“If a man is going to make a mistake,” Michael’s father would have said, “it’s best for him to make it when he is out of his own country, in a place where no one knows him.”

Exley wasn’t the mistake his pop would have meant. Some tight-mouthed, four-eyed WASP with a patrician accent. About the only thing their families ever might have agreed upon was how good the war was for business. If his country had been the same as his father’s country, Michael might even have done the smart thing and walked away. But being closer to Sicily meant nothing to him then. The Atlantic had burned away the part of him that played it straight in New York and what he was left with was a packet of prophylactics paid for by the good old US of A and this Ed Exley. This Ed Exley who looked like he’d never done a wrong thing in his life until he blushed when Michael lit his cigarette for him.

“I was told to look for you,” Exley said after Michael shook the match out.

“Someone say I had booze?”

The pink stayed on Exley’s cheeks. “That you had the second half of _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ , actually.”

He did, and though it was nothing that would ever show up in any newspapers, it was the wartime accomplishment that most impressed the rank-and-file guys, who read their ASEs to ribbons and bitched that they were always coming across Steinbeck and London, that _White Fang_ and _Cannery Row_ were fine but what they really wanted was _Brooklyn_. Everyone had a hard-on for _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_.

“I do,” Michael said calmly. “What would you give for it?”

“ _Daisy Miller_.”

“Read it in college.”

“Then you’ll read it again and we’ll have a discussion about Henry James and Americans abroad before we go our separate ways,” Exley said. “It’s short enough.”

“Then you’d leave with two books and I wouldn’t even have one.”

“ _Daisy_ I’d let you keep.”

 _Daisy, daisy, give me your answer true._ Michael hummed it and Exley got that ridiculous blush back again. He didn’t have the coloring to get away with it—an Italian would have been dark enough for that blood not to show so easily. It embarrassed Michael on his behalf, because it wasn't, he thought, how a man should look, but it attracted him, too.  Like the glasses.  Like the prissy mouth.  They presented him with a series of alibis, that he could claim, even to himself, that all of them together unmanned Ed Exley to the point where Michael wanting him was irrelevant. Empty information, a junk radio signal that, once the boys decoded it, turned out to be nothing at all: an advertisement for soap or liquid stockings, just the Germans fucking with them. The alibis excused the crime, which wasn't as simple as it seemed.  He liked that Exley looked breakable, though he wasn't sure he wanted to break him. He didn't understand himself.

He said, “What’re your plans for when you get home?”

Exley stared him down like it was all OSS-classified, but then he said, “Los Angeles Police Department,” and it was a mistake Michael wanted to make more and more. There was no streak of legitimacy that could survive untarnished a confrontation with cops. Michael knew that without being told, without ever even having gotten a speeding ticket. He’d grown up seeing the FBI take pictures of his parents on the street. He had some duty almost to break Exley the way a vandal broke storefront windows: not because there was something he wanted but because their cheap shine got in his eyes like a glare.

“Suppose when we get back to the States I fly to LA and tell every guy in blue I can find that you make bum offers on books.”

“If you did, you’d see how few of them could read.” Exley gave a sudden, brittle laugh and then a smile that was so utterly disarming Michael almost stepped back from it. “That’s close to blasphemy in my family, you know. No matter how many times my father said it.”

Michael didn’t want to talk about fathers. “Come on,” he said, wanting just to end it, feeling like he had his arm pulled back for a punch he wasn’t allowed to throw. “It’s in my footlocker.”

It wasn’t—he carried it buttoned into his jacket because any lock would have been busted in a second if the guys in his unit had known he’d left _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ unguarded—but it gave him an excuse to cross through the chilly mud back to the half-bombed out bakery they’d been squatting in while they were waiting for orders. Michael really had peeled off from the rest of them, that much was true, so he took Exley up the stairs and into the dark little pantry that was still white in places from flour and stone-dust.  At home, he was never alone; this too was something he only did in another country.

“Close the door,” he said.

He waited for Exley to say there’d be no light at all if he did, but Exley didn’t. He just shut the two of them in that yeasty darkness: Jesus, Michael thought, he was like a lamb to the slaughter.

“Never mind,” Michael said. “I don’t think it’s in here after all.”

“No,” Exley said. “Probably not.”

Then Michael didn’t know who moved first, but he wanted it to have been him. He knew he was the one who undid the brass buttons on Exley’s pants and shoved them down. In the dark, all he could see of Exley was white—his eyes and his teeth and the starchy peek of his shirt through the uniform—and that seemed like a shame, seemed like something that should be compensated by touch. He sucked hard at Exley’s neck and Exley said, “A little rough, aren’t we?” like it was bad manners, but there was that funny hollow laughter in his voice again.

“You talk like you’re at a country club,” Michael said.

Exley said, almost curiously, “Would you know?” Like Michael was some Escher he was thinking of buying if he only he could make sense of it, add rationality to his taste. “Corleone.” He pushed his hands up against Michael’s chest until his shirt came untucked but that seemed to be all he wanted, even with his trousers down around his ankles.

Michael said, “You’ve done this before.”

“Oh, at the country club. In between games of polo, rounds of golf.” The white of his teeth brightened, lengthened with a smile and Michael gave a backhanded tap right there, hard, because he wanted the slap for the insult, or what he took to be the insult, but Exley didn’t leave: only stopped smiling. He hit Michael back, open-palmed, right across his jaw, and Michael’s heartbeat sped up. His cock ached.

“I figured _you_ for new at it,” Exley said, even as he went back to whatever he’d been doing with Michael’s shirt: forcing his hands underneath it, laying warm palms against the flat plane of Michael’s stomach. “With the amount of talking it took. I’ve already read _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_ —as a matter of fact, I’ve got the first half of it in my jacket now. You can keep yours.” He unbuttoned Michael’s pants.

“Get down on your knees,” Michael said.

Exley shook his head. “I’m not interested in delayed gratification and if I wanted to touch myself, I wouldn’t have picked you up in the first place. Bed.”

He got Michael down and, almost at that point to Michael’s surprise, let Michael put him on his hands and knees. The condom, he decided, didn’t matter, not for what he wanted, and then again there was nothing that could make any of this safe, not with Exley’s laugh still ringing in his ears. He spat in his hand and slicked himself up and went between Exley’s thighs. So long half-undressed in the damp little room had made Exley’s skin cold and Michael gasped without meaning to. Exley did, too, and then while he didn’t laugh again, he said, “With limited options, always trust a Catholic,” with a sense of irony corkscrewed in on itself so tightly it had turned to wonderment.

So it was Michael’s turn to laugh. “Endless creativity.”

Exley tightened his muscles as Michael thrust against him and his skin warmed quickly. Michael liked the dark but couldn't help visualizing him: the wire-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose, jarred by each thrust; formerly pursed lips open in silent pleasure; cock blood-dark next to the milky white of his legs. When it seemed like the lines between their bodies had blurred a little, Michael felt he could reach out without compromising himself—he wasn’t jerking off another man, not in the sense of Exley being separate from him. When he moved, Exley moved. When his hand brushed low, he could feel himself moving against Exley’s balls; could hear his groan that could have doubled for Exley's. All of this was him and all of it was for him. Exley wasn’t the only heretic in the room. This was the mistake—the hot slide of their bodies against each other for one thing and that he had laughed at Exley’s joke for another—but where he’d gone against his family was different. Was in the moments when he felt self-sufficient, self-sufficing, a king in his own right. There was never to be any divorce between anyone and the family, but Michael thought: _I’m enough on my own to be anyone, to be all of them._

That same slipperiness, like he was with himself, a casual fuck folded up like origami, made him come, his hand squeezing hard around Exley’s cock and making Exley come too, though afterwards, Michael told himself it was nothing more than friction. Friction and pressure. Nothing had changed hands between them, not even half of _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_.

“I think I remember,” Exley said, flipping his collar neatly down again and running those long fingers through his hair. Michael had lit the lamp even though they both could have gotten dressed in the dark. He didn’t know why; didn’t know what he was hoping to see. “Where I’ve heard your name before.”

“I didn’t know you were wondering.”

“Why would I have told you before I’d found out the answer?”

“With that kind of attitude you’ll make a good cop, but a better lawyer.”

Exley put his glasses back on. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “I know what I want.”

He gave away more than he wanted to: "That must be nice."

Two little circles of glass staring back at him.  "Maybe you'll find out."

Michael had no intention of explaining anything. No matter what, he was never going to go back to the States and fly to LA and see Exley again. There would be no hotel room for them, no towels with embroidered palm trees, no knowing looks from bellhops--whatever kind of lavender happiness faggots dreamed about. And their chance of some amiable parting had probably gone up in smoke the first time Exley had said his name, with that sound in his voice like he was rolling the syllables around like wine. He thought most of the men he knew would eat Ed Exley alive. But suddenly, uncomfortably, he thought that his father might respect him, might say, “A man who cannot be bought is a dangerous man, but more of a man than any other. Even if you kill him, you see to his children, you put flowers on his grave. Because that is an honorable man.”

But honor was impossible for both of them, even if Exley acted like what they’d done in the pantry touched nothing else.

Michael said, “‘I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.’”

Exley looked over at him.

“ _Daisy Miller_ ,” Michael said.

Exley said, “I don’t live here,” very dismissively.

But really, Michael didn’t know which one of them he had meant. When he met Kay, later, he was more aware that he could not become her and she could not become him, but he still felt, comfortably, like her body could be his, could be possessed by him, that there would come moments when they would blur. But not profoundly. He had, he thought, outgrown that, had come at last to ownership without complication.


End file.
